


Insisting Their Own Heroism

by jackmarlowe



Series: No Mean City [2]
Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Drug Use, Gen, glasgowfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-13
Updated: 2013-08-13
Packaged: 2017-12-23 08:33:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/924159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/pseuds/jackmarlowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In later years, flatmates and the other people who sit jittering on moulding cocaine couches with Malcolm Tucker the inglorious half-a-punk, aged twenty-three, will remember Sandinista.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insisting Their Own Heroism

**Author's Note:**

> I told you these'd be short but I know, I'll write a proper one next time.
> 
> Title stolen from the 1981 John Piccarella Rolling Stone review of The Clash's Sandinista.

In later years, flatmates and the other people who sit jittering on moulding cocaine couches with Malcolm Tucker the inglorious half-a-punk, aged twenty-three, will remember _Sandinista_. Malcolm will remember _Combat Rock_ ; Jamie will learn all the words out of the noise for love; _Sandinista_ is nevertheless the formative fucking event. 

He sits with the needle between his fingers and skips. It goes ‘Lose This Skin’ again and again and a fucking gain, thrumming through strings and wailing, a cocaine song. Malcolm smokes to it and fills the room. Like Michael and Jamaican Susie and her cycle-through girlfriend, he is too thin, but with Malcolm it’s occupational, cultivated, fitting. In a few years once he stops rolling his cigarettes it’s professional, but by then Glasgow's snapped past.

They do heroin years after the next album comes and he gets lost, absinthe-eyed and panting pale and sickly knees to his chest on the mouldy couch, to ‘Junkie Slip’. This is what moves him to the window, the fucking sink that won’t go, gets him a glass of water, bashes his head on the cabinet, stretches his legs. It only happens once and then up calls the newspaper like Vietnam and the Four Beasts, but things could’ve turned otherwise.

When they can’t afford a third bed and his mam won’t yet have him back, Malcolm sleeps on a gutted mattress and _Sandinista_ rests six inches from his head like a gun, propped up and glaring at the lounge and the world as he dreams of rain and demolition sites. Fuck off. _Fuck off_ , red and black and white. These are powerful colours for advertising. He knows this by sabretooth instinct later. Swastikas and the White Stripes and Coke. Here, it means metal-buzzing and blotting a deathflood nosebleed, very deliberately, on a crumpled _Herald_ photo of the Prime Minister. Malcolm remembers this vague half-a-thought process dismissively, like you do blitzed psychokiller AM thoughts from youth, though it was a Sunday evening at eight o’clock with a deadline in the morning with ‘The Leader’ digging needle grooves: he wanted to see if she looked _vulnerable or dangerous_ in red.


End file.
